The Rest is Just a Small Matter of Programming

Dare Obasanjo has a thoughtful and interesting take on the recently-announced Google Gears:

It seems that without providing data synchronization out of the box, Google Gears leaves the most difficult and cumbersome aspect of building a disconnected Web app up to application developers. This may be OK for Google developers using Google Gears since the average Google coder is a Ph.D but the platform isn't terribly useful to Web application developers who want to use it for anything besides a super-sized HTTP cookie. 

A number of other bloggers such as Roger Jennings and Tim Anderson have also pointed that the lack of data synchronization in Google Gears is a significant oversight. If Google intends for Google Gears to become a platform that will be generally useful to the average Web developer then the company will have to fix this oversight. Otherwise, they haven't done as much for the Web development world as the initial hype led us to believe 

I haven't looked into Gears in detail, but several other developers at Google Developer Day voiced the thought that there's much more work to be done than simply adding Gears to take an on-demand application offline. Hopefully at some point I'll have a good excuse to develop such an application so I can have a more informed opinion of Gears.